Fortune is a Woman Read Online Free PDF

house of Harrison has to offer, but now there is something else I have to show you. Something special." Pushing back his chair, he rose to his feet, and with a flourish removed the silver dome. "Gentlemen," he said proudly, "may I introduce my son and heir—Harmon Lloyd Harrison, Junior."
    The tiny baby, naked but for a cotton diaper, lay sleeping on a bed of green ferns oblivious to the laughter and applause. Grabbing the silver platter Harmon Harrison held it aloft. "A toast, gentlemen, to my son," he called, and the baby's health was solemnly drunk in the finest vintage port wine.
    Francie stood unnoticed by the door as the silver platter with its tiny human burden was passed from hand to hand around the table. The baby was as still and silent as her rag doll. A scream forced itself from her throat as she launched herself suddenly at her father.
    "Stop them, Papa, stop them," she screamed, throwing her arms tightly around his legs. "Don't let them eat him!"
    "Francesca!" The depth of anger in her father's voice froze her screams into instant silence. With a gesture he indicated she should be removed and a servant pulled her clinging arms from his immaculate gray pinstriped trousers.
    "I shall deal with you in the morning," he said quietly in a tone that changed her blood to ice as they bore her away. It was then that Francie first realized her father did not love her.
    ***
    Hate was too strong a word to describe Harmon Harrison's attitude toward his daughter; for him she simply did not exist. His son was what he had desired above anything else and all his energy, all his ambition, all his life force went into grooming him to take over his position as head of the Harrison Mercantile and Savings Bank, as well as the myriad other Harrison business enterprises that fueled his lavish lifestyle and his ever-growing fortune.
    Harmon had always claimed that his father came from old Yankee stock, from Philadelphia, and that his mother's ancestors had come over on the Mayflower. Nothing could have been further from the truth. His father, Lloyd Harrison, was a Yankee all right, but he was an itinerant trader whose life had been devoted to making a fast buck when and wherever he could, legal or otherwise, and to pleasuring any attractive woman who fell for his rough, dark good looks and practiced line of patter.
    Lloyd had arrived in San Francisco, a town of tents and shanties, with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket earned selling guns and ammunition to settlers in the middle west. He was quick to take his talents out to the gold-fields, where he bartered, dealt, and traded in everything from canvas tents to picks and shovels, candles, tea, liquor, barroom fittings, Bibles, and brass beds for bordellos. Sometimes he was paid in cash, sometimes in still-worthless gold stock, and it was the stock that ultimately made him a rich man. With his fickle, fly-by-night nature, Lloyd never hung on to his stock; when it rose from worthless to lucky strike and hit a thousand dollars a share, he sold, and then he bought up real estate in San Francisco, cheap sandy lots that within a year were selling for small fortunes. Though he never put his shoulder to the pick and shovel in the gold mines everything Lloyd touched turned to pure eighteen-karat nuggets sitting snugly in a vault in the California Bank.
    Within two years he was a millionaire, within five a multimillionaire, but he still preferred the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the shantytowns near the gold mines to the urban pleasures of a growing San Francisco.
    One day he had found himself with a shipment of fancy gowns and feathered hats direct from Paris. There was a shortage of women in San Francisco, so he took them to the only place where there were both women and money. The bordellos of the boom silver mining town, Virginia City.
    He sold half a dozen fashionable dresses and some delicious silk underwear to Bessie Maloney, the buxom, dark-haired proprietress of Maloney's Cat House,